


as heaven’s sphere is greater than the earth.

by perfectlight



Series: trepidation of the spheres [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Childhood, Fairy Tale Style, Gen, Holmes Brothers' Childhood, Holmes Family, Kid Mycroft, Kid Sherlock, Kidlock, Loneliness, Mind Palace, Sherlock Holmes and Experiments, Storytelling, leaning on the fourth wall to tell this story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-29
Updated: 2013-10-29
Packaged: 2017-12-30 19:54:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlight/pseuds/perfectlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every palace comes from somewhere, and this one comes from a story. A story we know, perhaps, for we've at least seen how it ends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as heaven’s sphere is greater than the earth.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Dante's _Inferno_.

**as heaven’s sphere is greater than the earth.**

 

 

_Can I tell you a story? It’s one you’ll not have heard._

 

_I won’t say that it’s about a lonely little boy, because we all know that story. The lonely little boy takes his loneliness by the hand and squeezes tight, makes it into his strength, his smarts, his skill. He takes the sadness and uses it for happy, for good. Which is hard, but they don’t tell you that._

 

_This is not that story, even if our little boy is as lonely as can be._

 

_He’s a beautiful little boy, because they always are in stories. Swaths of black, black hair, just messy enough to be sweet, and eyes so big on milky skin you’ll never see where they end, because all those thick, thick lashes and swirling, shifting iris colours, grey and blue and green and back again, they’ll turn your heart to a little melted mess against your ribs. Dripping down and tingling when you hear that tiny voice, high as a girl’s and lofty with smarts, with skill, and with secret sweetness. The tiny boy, pale as moonshine, who fits and tantrums at dinner parties that celebrate his brother’s going-away. Leaving for a horrid, stuffy school, as the older brothers always did, only to come back wise and puffed with motes of dust and motes of knowledge, with a betterness the littler ones can’t seem to see their brothers past. Fits and screams and breaks old china till his brother has to hold him tight and promise he’ll come home. And because little boys have sharp-edged hearts sometimes, ours will snarl and say he doesn’t care and hates everything, but we all know, don’t we, that he cares so much and loves more than that tiny skinny chest knows how to hold._

 

_But the big brother goes away and the little boy hasn’t anything to hold him down any longer, so he wanders and unravels and gets lonely, lonelier, loneliest. The big, big eyes get sharp and steely and he shoots out needles with them, pins down discoveries and thoughts and the people around. The boys in the stories have governesses, or tutors, and so does ours, but they don’t understand him and he doesn’t understand them and sometimes that’s worse than being alone, you know. He wanders when they get angry and he wanders when they leave and he finds nooks and crannies, cairns and passages, molds and spiders that carve webs into crumbling stone._

 

_If his story were a story of a journey, of a quest, this is where it would start. A wizard would arrive at the old, old manor, give our little boy a sword or shield or dusty thick book and whisper that there is something beyond the horizon, and he can catch it if he runs._

 

_That is not his story, even if our little boy wants to run away._

 

_But they dress him up in fancy clothes like a beautiful little prince, and even though the sight of the silks and satins on his little pale self would make the gooey remnants of any heart melt away again, the pretty clothes and the pretty home were what kept him from running to the woods. Once he tried to make the rich earth that would track warm across his feet in the lab that belonged to father, and there were samples and dust and fascinating colours from smoke, but all his hard work brought him was a lump of black tarry muck and a red hand hard across one cheek, a clean up this awful mess you’ve made, a go to your room without supper._

 

_Little boys need their supper like their soil and their storybooks, but every fairy tale needs a good old-fashioned villain, even if our little boy won’t learn this for a long, long time indeed. A wander into the dragon’s den left him with a bite from the dragon itself and a steaming pile of fool’s gold, and in between the sheets of silk and satin our little boy buried his beautiful face and made a palace in his head._

 

_Palaces could have woods and soil and storybooks in them, and their turrets could be made of coloured smoke, if we wanted them to the way our little boy did. The dragons could burrow their ugly way out of his ears while marble white as moonshine built up, column by column and stone by stone, a palace made of memories to live in as he dreams. A palace for a beautiful little prince in nothing but a dressing gown, who runs wild and barefoot and lonely and free._

**Author's Note:**

> It's quite late at night. I'm not entirely sure what time, honestly, and I'd rather not check, because I woke half in a dream with this story in my head and typed the first page with my eyes hardly open. Maybe in the morning I'll see it's short and strange and shouldn't be up yet. Maybe.


End file.
